NVIDIA’s Vera CPU With 88 Olympus “Arm” Cores Outperforms AMD EPYC & Intel Xeon In First Benchmarks

The first NVIDIA Vera CPU benchmarks have been released, showcasing a huge gain over Grace while outperforming the latest AMD EPYC & Intel Xeon chips.

NVIDIA Vera CPU Brings An Impressive 63% Performance Bump Over Grace CPU, Challenges x86 Chips From AMD & Intel

NVIDIA recently announced that its Vera CPUs were in full production, hand-delivering the first CPU racks to major AI firms such as OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic, and Oracle. Vera is a fundamental component of the Extreme Co-Design ecosystem powering the Rubin platform, but with Vera, NVIDIA is entering into a new market for the first time: Standalone CPUs.

The ARM-based CPU with 88 custom Olympus cores is all set to deliver some big upgrades, with NVIDIA promising 50% better performance, twice the performance per watt (efficiency), and four times the density per rack vs traditional x86 CPUs. It’s a CPU that is purpose-built for Agentic AI and Inference domains.

Now, the first benchmarks of NVIDIA’s Vera CPU have been published by Phoronix, and they showcase a big leap in performance.

In the Geomean of all test results, the NVIDIA Vera CPU with 88 Olympus cores ended up 63% faster than its predecessor, the 72-core Grace CPU. The CPU was also 10% faster than AMD’s EPYC 9575F, which has a total of 64 “Zen 5” cores clocked at 5 GHz, while also beating the Intel Xeon 6980P, a 128-core chip based on the Granite Rapids family, by…